The ComFor‘s web editorial team will take a break over the summer months. Therefore, there will be no regular posts on the website until 30 September 2019. We will, however, keep updating the sections on ongoing calls for papers and on exhibitions.
But before we say good bye, we would like to announce the formation of a new committee within the ComFor, the Committee for Diversity, an initiative instigated by ComFor Vice-President Véronique Sina.
The aim of this committee is to contribute to an equal, gender-neutral research culture by promoting the visibility of non-hegemonic, queer-feminist research and researchers, both within the ComFor as well as in the comics studies community in general. The initiative is a reaction to a lack of diversity that characterises the field of comics studies in many ways, for example in terms of methodological approaches and the canon of works as well as the research community in general. To counteract these excluding mechanisms of representation, the Committee for Diversity aims at establishing a more inclusive research environment and introduce new academic impulses.
Last year’s annual ComFor Conference, which was dedicated to topics relating to intersectional gender and diversity studies, showed both the great necessity of and interest in queer-feminist questions and perspectives in the field of comics studies. But it also clarified the desideratum and the gaps that need to be explored to arrive at a critically reflexive and interdisciplinary engagement with comics.
With the foundation of the Committee for Diversity, the ComFor takes an important step to fill these gaps and to send a clear message against any form of discrimination and exclusion.
Currently the committee is in the planning phase, but during this year’s annual ComFor Conference at Schwarzenbach, a constitutive meeting will take place on 10 November, 2019, during which the committee‘s approach and line of work will be decided.
For further information, contact the Committee for Diversity via email: AGDiversity@comicgesellschaft.de
For now, we wish all of our readers a nice summer and look forward to once more keep you posted with regular news on comics studies in early autumn.
All the best,
Robin-Martin Aust, Katharina Serles, and Natalie Veith
on behalf of the web editorial team